The amount of stamina a mercenary possesses plays a big part in determining how well he/she can traverse the battlefield. Stamina limits the ability for a mercenary to jump, sprint and melee. Total stamina and stamina recovery rate can be improved with Cardiac Regulators and Cardiac Stimulants.

When crouched, scan profile is reduced, making it more difficult for enemies to detect you on their minimaps. Also, when firing from the hip, being crouched increases accuracy and decreases recoil. There is also reduced recoil when firing whilst aiming down your sights. Sniper rifles have significantly reduced initial scope sway when the user is crouched.

When a melee attack is triggered, damage is distributed (according to base melee damage and all bonuses) in an arc in front of you. This damage deals the same damage to shields and armour.[citation needed]

Base movement capabilities are determined by dropsuits. Stamina is one of these components, and it effects almost all physical movement besides walking in-game. Stamina is directly impacted by certain modules. However, other items do impact upon movement, such as

Shield-Tanking is the use of shield modules in order to increase a dropsuit or vehicle's health. It is primarily used on Caldari units, but has secondary usage with the Minmatar as well. The Amarr prefer tanking with both shields and armor.

Scanning in DUST 514 affects the visibility of mercenaries on TACNET (minimap) as well as the ability to "light up" mercenaries within your field of vision to alert team members of their position. It can be broken down into three categories. All dropsuits will have a scan profile, scan precision and scan radius.

Scan Profile determines how easy you are to discover on enemy radar, and show up with a red tag on the enemy HUD. Your base Scan Profile is determined by the dropsuit you are wearing. That can be further modified by the Dropsuit and Profile Dampening skills, along with Profile Dampener modules.

Furthermore:

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Sprinting/walking/crouching does not have an impact on whether or not you show up on the enemy minimap. Different dropsuits do have different signatures (with the scout having the lowest) that make you more or less likely to be picked up by an enemy scan. You can of course influence this with modules and the better the scanner the harder it will be to hide from it.

In order to detect enemies yourself, your dropsuit carries a base Scan Precision which determines how easily you can detect an enemy. Any enemy which has a scan profile (which will be altered by performing actions such as firing weapons or moving) higher than your scan precision will be detected on the minimap. This means that a low scan precision is better.

It is worth noting that it is very easy to confuse scan precision with the precision of your scanning. As scan precision decreases, the quality and hence accuracy (and yes, precision) of the scan improves. Scan precision can be enhanced by using Precision Enhancers. Scan precision can also be improved (once again, improvement means a decrease in scan precision) permanently by upgrading the Precision Enhancement skill.

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The LOWER your Scan Precision is, the more acute your personal awareness, and thus how easily you can pick up enemies on your personal tacnet radar without actually visually spotting them for you and your teammates.[1]

Hacking is an integral part in interaction with the environment in DUST. The hacking panel on a mercenary's left arm allows him or her to access Installations and enemy vehicles.

Hacking is performed by holding down circle on the DS3 controller or E on the keyboard when facing a hackable object. Installations and vehicles can be hacked from any side as long as you're close enough. Note: NULL Cannons are an exception. You must be facing the corresponding hacking panel to hack these objectives.

If multiple teammates are hacking the same item together, the hack will get done faster, and the assisting teammates will earn War Points for assisting.

Hacking can be disrupted by:

Killing the hacker

Moving the hacker away from the object being hacked

Accessing the object being hacked (entering a vehicle or installation prevents hackers from hacking it)

Recalling a vehicle prevents it from being hacked.

Turning away from the object you're hacking. At a sufficient angle (more than 90 degrees from the object), hacking is disrupted.

Generally, these weapons overheat when they apply sustained fire. An additional bar next to the ammunition indicator shows the progress of overheating of a weapon. Heat disperses from the weapon when not firing.

It is important to especially note the difference in the charging mechanism of the forge gun to the other three. A forge gun can only discharge a round when fully charged, whereas all other weapons may have their charges released at any moment before becoming fully charged to deal lesser damage.

Similar to the charging mechanic of weapons, currently only Railgun vehicle weaponry (including installations) require spool-up time. This limits their rate of fire, as railgun turrets deal immense amounts of damage over long distances.

All turrets have a tracking speed. Tracking speed denotes the rate at which a turret rotates or swivels in relation to a player's controls. There is a very noticeable difference in the tracking speeds, for example, of blaster and railgun installations.

When reviving a mercenary, your body must be positioned above the place where the body has been flung upon death. This area will be denoted by a revival indicator, if the body is unable to be seen. A prompt will display the relevant input to activate the injector.

It is unnecessary to select the injector from the equipment wheel to use it, however it appears doing so will result in a smoother revival.

Upon death, a mercenary has around 20 seconds of 'bleed out' time. During this time, a mercenary may view the kill screen which displays the killer's basic stats and the overview map. (note that once you're in the overview map after selecting to skip the kill screen, you cannot go back)

In both the kill screen and overview map, a bleeding out mercenary may opt to Call for Help, and this causes your injector indicator for all mercenaries with injectors to blink.

After you're revived, mercenaries may use what is termed a 'power slide'. Simply by holding down your movement controls in a certain direction as you're being revived, you will essentially 'slide' towards that location as you're getting back on your feet.